Harry Gold, CEO and Founder of Overdrive Interactive has given an enlightening presentation about the advanced social media marketing skills and how they can be so beneficial when running a business today. Here are some highlights right from the source.

The goal is to create brand connections versus just impressions. The lines are blurring in the digital marketing space — SEO, paid search, analytics, email marketing, online media, social media, creative website development — are all used in addition to  traditional marketing methods.

Architecting user flow is just as important asunderstanding the details. The trick to being a marketing engineer is to always be asking — “and then what?” Digital marketing is not a one step process, you should always be asking what is the next step in escalating a prospect through the sales process.

Once you bring a customer to your site, if you’re not engaging them to explore more, your missing opportunities and the potential to build that connection.

For social promotions and campaigns, you don’t need a million fans or followers to be successful, you can use social marketing strategy to add strength to your other programs. Overdrive’s work for Harley Davidson was a good example. You can read more about it here.

An excellent case study, also created by Overdrive Interactive, provides a great example on how to integrate various social media venues. You can check out this winner of the IAC Internet Award Competition here.

A third campaign that illustrates how to generate great content without having to rely on only your own resources, is this LogMeIn video.

SEO and social media work hand in hand to promote your message, so thinking about keywords is very important. Progress Software’s “operational responsiveness” took advantage of this by embedding the term into the presence of the online community and inviting bloggers to video record their input about the topic.

When weaving your social media platform (YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr) you have to ask, why would anyone want to be your “friend.” You really need to understand your audience which will in turn help you to determine the right content to create. The creation of a content bank is key for providing valuable content that your audience will want to share.

Socially enable your content with fun social sharing buttons. What’s most important is how others in the social media sphere are perceiving you, so get used to making these buttons your friends. Also start integrating “sharing” into your daily workflow. If you download a white paper, share it!

Creating light weight content and infographics is an excellent way to create more social awareness. I’m sure you’ve seen many examples of these over the past year. At times it can be difficult to create a visually interesting graphic, so agencies like CGI can add that professional style that helps your material look credible — increasing the chances that it will be passed around.

In order to measure ROI, source and create your content stream from your planned content. You can create a publishing schedule that takes advantage of your content stream as well as publish past the 9 to 5 workday. There are many tools that help manage this process as well as provide analytics that help you measure your ROI.

If you were at this event, what was your take-away?

No control!  Positive Influence!  Do you care about what others are saying about you?

For corporations Reputation Management is a pretty popular topic amongst CMO’s.  The reason being, social voices of consumers are being heard at an infectious rate and companies are scrambling to figure out how to protect their brand.  Nowadays a brand can’t hide if they make even the slightest mistake.  With the amplification power of social media, gone are the days of “isolated” incidents.  What has become prevalent is who is saying what, when are they saying it, where did they say it (how has it spread), what are they saying (positive or negative), and who are they saying it to (how relevant is the audience).

From a reputation standpoint, most brands attack social media messaging all wrong.  Most are trying to control the public conversation of their brand.  The truth is brands never had control of the conversation.  Brands can push their message through all media, but the way it is interpreted in the public domain could have the exact opposite effect that the brand was looking to message. What brands do have is influence and their good “customer first” deeds can go along way.

So what should a company do?

Brands should be monitoring the conversations that are taking place, not only regarding their brand but also their industry.  When a company engages with interested patrons of the brand, they positively influence the reach of their brand. By listening and engaging in the conversations, brands can add value, knowledge, experience, and expertise. Companies that are actively looking for and engaging in these opportunities see a positive impact!

Follow @RichLoPresti on Twitter to learn more about how your brand can benefit from social media.

Richard LoPresti is a seasoned financial advisor turned social.  He has always been interested in social communication technology and became an early adopter of social media to meet, engage and influence more clients.  Now, he is a leader in financial services social media and marketing space and has accumulated thousands of daily Twitter followers. He advises other Financial Institutions, and Sales Professionals  in becoming more efficient and effective in their business practices.  He is a recognized leader in client/advisor social media communications both online and offline.  He is the founder of RecommendedAdvisor.com  a website dedicated to helping Financial Advisors and Financial Institutions utilize Social Technology in a compliant fashion to grow their business.  With much success Richard has since expanded his expertise and consulting to other industries.

Storytelling is a tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation.  And although how the stories are told has changed, the intrinsic quality of sharing a story has remained the same.  Storytelling can be used to communicate history, impart wisdom, and provide entertainment.  From a business perspective storytelling is a way to convey a message with your audience that makes your listeners feel included.  How you choose to tell your story impacts the audience you attract and the overall perception of your brand.

As interactive storytellers, naturally we are excited Facebook Timeline has officially launched for all brands!  According to Jamie Tedford of Forbes “the entire Facebook platform is organized around the generation and amplification of stories.”  The Timeline presents the opportunity to document the history of your brand and really share your story from the very beginning.  Don’t think of it as simply an update on Facebook but rather as a short story within the larger framework of your brand’s novel.

You can approach storytelling multiple ways. For example, we designed and developed a 3D city for Faro as an interactive map with products placed in situations throughout the environment, inviting audience exploration.  As user moves through the city, they gain an understanding of overall story of how Faro products are used in large variety of situations, and they also discover how specific products benefit targeted applications.  Through this layered approach, Faro is telling the story of their product within an interactive 3D city.

Another method to tell a story is through interactive presenting, ideally you as the presenter will take the foreground of the presentation.  The goal is to create opportunities for dialogue through interacting with the presentation, rather than just a monologue. The iPad is one of the best tools to achieve this style of presenting.  Our clients have found the level of interactivity astounding.  There’s just something about physically sliding an object along the screen that gives you a sense of involvement and participation.  One of our designers compared the interactivity of the iPad to the first time he had electric car windows. “Even though the motion is simple, the fact that you can interact with it is thrilling.”

Now back to the Facebook Timeline, its interactivity comes from apps that create “custom actions.”  These custom actions are crucial because they enable customers to interact with your brand by telling good stories. This in turn helps build brand loyalty because the brand becomes more than just a product.  And creating interactive stories “is the key to both acquiring new customers while engaging and retaining your existing ones,” says Tedford.  Facebook Timeline is by no means the end all be all of storytelling but it is a great place to start collecting the chapters that complete your brand’s story.